I did so because it was irrelevant. I wasn't concerned with the dependent clause.
"Conspiracy" does not matter if there was no restraint of trade or commerce. That is the controlling clause. If there is no "restraint of trade or commerce", then the dependent clause preceding it is irrelevant. Take out that defining clause and you are left with:
"Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, is declared to be illegal."
I have a trust. I am trustee of several trusts. I am in quite few contracts. If someone is on a strict weightless diet, and I agree to go to dinner with that someone, that could be considered a "conspiracy", absent the nefarious intent, or a contract but generally not, since no money changes hands between the two parties going to dinner unless my dieting buddy is paying me to sneak him out of the house against his wife's wishes, so we are back to conspiring to go to dinner. . . but removing the purpose in the primary clause makes every contract illegal. That's illogical.
The US Supreme Court in Leegin, 2007, which supplanted all jurisprudence that came before it, expanding on the previous decision in Areeda & Hovenkamp, 2004, which ALSO supplanted all previous jurisprudence that came before it, declared that VERTICAL participants' Actions MUST (there's one of those WORDS with a meaning again) be looked at differently than HORIZONTAL participants' Actions in any anti-trust legal case. The US Supreme Court, the final Arbiter of what the LAW ACTUALLY SAYS, established that a vertical participant MUST be evaluated by the RULE OF REASON rather than the per se rule used for all horizontal participants, competitors, who act in concert to act in a non-competitive manner.
By requiring the Rule of Reason for a vertical participant, which Apple being neither a publisher nor a wholesaler, clearly was not, and by the decision of the highest court in the land, could NOT be a horizontal conspirator and therefore, again by decision of the highest court in the land, had to be judged by the Rule of Reason under which Apple had only to show they increased competition, which is NOT, again by legal definition "a restraint of trade or commerce" in the market in which they were entering, which the court had ruled in two previous res judicata, decided cases, that such a vertical participant who had increased competition could not be found guilty of restraining trade because restraint of trade simply had not happened. That is what the Supreme Court is saying if your REASON tells you that restraint of trade or commerce has NOT OCCURRED, then no crime is evident, no guilt can exist if there is no damage the law was intended to prevent.
The US Supreme Court by ordering that the lower courts not use the per se standard but instead use the Rule of Reason when evaluating a vertical participant's involvement in a horizontal antitrust action to determine if that involvement resulted in increased competition, involving the vertical participant, and that the vertical participant had economic motives other than those of the horizontal participants. All that had to be demonstrated was that no economic damage to the market, not consumers, was created by the participation of the vertical participant, because it was merely competing against others in the market. The law must assume innocence and NOT guilt on the part of participants. The per se rule assumes guilt where there may be only perfectly legal self-interest. The application of the Rule of Reason should be applied to make that determination. That can be found by looking to see if the market shrinks, or remains static while prices drop or remain static, or not, which IS the sign of a vertical participant who is conspiring to restrain trade or commerce.
Once the Supreme Court has ruled, it is what is known as settled law, and that is a legal precedent that MUST be followed in all courts in the United States. It is not just something that is optional. It is an interpretation of what is how a court must determine, by using the Rule of Reason not the per se rule governing horizontal participants, which is what you are demanding, whether a particular accused vertical participant is guilty of restraining trade or commerce or not. It was not an optional decision. Liberal Judge Cote decided to get around the required rule by merely redefining squishing and squozing the very obvious vertical participant Apple into be a member of the horizontal definition of defendants without even explaining how she could do that.
Judge Cote erred by impermissibly redefining Apple, a clearly vertical participant, as a horizontal participant so she could make her finding work. All further errors concatenate from that original and very deliberate and unsupportable definitional error. There is ZERO evidence to call Apple a horizontal participant.
Tex, when words start meaning anything someone wishes them to mean, they lose all meaning at all. That is the path the Liberals have been taking. Have you read George Orwell's "1984"?
Unless Congress chooses to re-address the anti-trust laws, what the US Supreme Court has ruled is supposed to be the law of the land. . . and in this instance, the lower courts were wrong. In my opinion and in a lot of legal scholars, the Court should have granted Certiorari and corrected the errors.